Men Who Cook (Women Who Eat)

View full sizeWriter Todd Keith arrives for a Men Who Cook, Women Who Eat supper gathering. (Photo by Cary Norton)

By Todd Keith

Photos by Cary Norton

It started as a lark.

One
afternoon at Homewood Park, several parents were standing around talking about cooking while our kids played at a birthday party. The conversation turned to what someone was cooking for dinner, and Mary Ann
Janas ran with it. "Hey, all the men know how to cook," she observed of
the group gathered. "We should have a party. The men can cook, and the women can drink wine!" And that was it. We formed a supper club, with "Men Who Cook, Women Who Eat" as the unofficial tag line.

At its core, our dinner club is about sharing the dishes that each one of us love to prepare in our own homes and discovering what the other guys love to cook. We all learn from each other and enjoy sharing recipes and
ideas as much as we enjoy watching the group's reaction to our contributions.

For example, I had no idea exactly what Niçoise salad was until Mike Janas' version blew me away. (I'm still slightly intimidated by the recipe, but I will make it soon.) Preparing a country
charcuterie never occurred to me, but I always devour Matt Boone's assorted pâté and rillettes when he makes it. Michael Breeden's pecan pie, made with maple syrup and heavy cream, is an evolutionary leap beyond the Karo-filled mud pies I usually make.

The five couples in our group gather every few months on an informal basis; it really comes down to who wants to host and what theme they want for the meal. The first event, held at Mike and Mary Ann's house, was a French-themed affair, largely because several of the men enjoy cooking French cuisine and, well, we all like drinking red wine from France. Since then we've done a Southern-comfort-food theme in the winter and a couple of Alabama
farm-fresh meals in the summer to take advantage of local produce at its peak. We've also done Indian and now Thai. We tried a German themed get-together but since several folks reflexively default to French, we ended up combining the two and making it a Alsace-Lorraine event, figuring that if Germany and France can't decide between the two, why should we? Next up is Mexican (think Sol y Luna, not Taco Bell) followed
by another farm-fresh theme in June or July.

What we haven’t done, interestingly, is venture very far out beyond what we already know
and love to cook. For instance, one persistent but unpersuasive guy has
been agitating for a Slovak/Czech night for at least a year but is getting no traction. If I had to make a prediction on where the group might head in the coming years, I'd say we we'll occasionally take on the odd, unknown ethnicity or style of cooking but generally keep dancing "with the one that brung ya'" and stick to what we know.

At
the Breedens' house over Thai food, the conversation turned to how the men got into cooking in the first place. "When I went to college, my mom
said, 'If you want clean clothes you better learn to wash 'em. And if you want to eat you better learn how to cook,' " Mac Logue explained. "I
rarely cook off a recipe anymore. Nine times out of 10 it's just what you have in the kitchen any given meal." Michael's breakdown was even simpler. "I cook because I get hungry," he said, diving into an anecdote
about how during the ice storm back in the early 1990s he was stuck at home by himself and decided to try to prepare chicken in a mushroom wine
sauce. Ever since that moment, he's been the cook in the house. And that's fine with his wife, Lori, who took one look at her dining room table set with basil rolls, Thai red pepper beef, fried shrimp heads, Thai-style pork ribs, cucumber salad, coconut soup, prawn and pineapple curry, assorted sauces and more and announced, "I've been in a dinner club, and I've been in a book club, and this is way more fun than either
of those!"

Mike Janas probably has logged the most hours in cooking classes, doing a Culinary Institute of America Boot Camp in New York for his 40th birthday a few years back. "There were lawyers who aren't happy being lawyers, sheep farmers, people from large chain restaurants, and me," explained Mike, who was in the trenches from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. for seven consecutive days. "Yeah, he kept calling me giving updates, recalled Mary Ann, rolling her eyes in mock indignation.
"'I just had all the foie gras I can sample and 20 different types of Champagne!'" she pantomimes in Mike's voice. "I told him, 'Don't call me
anymore, OK?' "

In each represented household, the breakdown of the male-to-female cooking ratio skews heavily male. Mac, Matt and Michael do 99 percent of the cooking in their household. Mike does the majority in his, and I probably do in mine, too. In some of the cases, the men are the more detail-minded of the couples, and if that leads to an assumption about our various retentive qualities, so be it.

But
the question that has intrigued us is why have we taken over a role traditionally claimed by women, and do we represent some larger cultural
trend? Is it because we all grew up in the 1970s during a time when women were burning their bras (well, not in Alabama) and stepping out of
the kitchens in force? Did the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s
and 1980s also mean men were liberated to move into the kitchen, freeing us from just manning the grill on the weekends? Are we drawn to cooking for a creative release from the mundane, daily patterns in life?
Is it because our wives all have high-intensity jobs where they are executives, business owners, professors and the like? Is it the desire to ensure that our children eat well and develop a sophisticated palate?
Or do we just selfishly want to eat what we want to eat? (I'll own up to that last one.)

Growing up in the '70s, my dad was the weekend warrior, creating elaborate breakfasts of country ham, egg casseroles in
the microwave (don't ask, it was a bad scene), biscuits and red-eye gravy as well as making Caesar salads from scratch and creating his own rubs for pork, chicken and steak. He threw himself into meals with a relentless enthusiasm that was not only fun to watch but was instructive
as well. But mom was the kitchen workhorse, duly turning out mid-week standards like hamburger steak, chow mien, hamburger pie, pita pizzas and other meals that got us through the week with full bellies and a feeling of contentment. There was always a slight undercurrent of functionality to Mom's time in the kitchen, as if she knew it was -- at the core -- a job that someone had to do. And she never dropped the ball.

At our recent Thai dinner, we talked about many of these things. Matt admitted he's started making his 11-year-old son Keefer cook one meal a week, adding that he is motivated to not only teach his kids but show his love for them through what he makes in the kitchen.

Mike
agreed that educating his children was important to him, too. "I want to encourage the kids because they are fascinated by cooking," he said. "They are good critics, too," chimed in Michael, before sharing his kids' insightful take on a recent culinary offering: " 'Dad, this was good, but it wasn't really one of your best efforts.' " It occurs to me that hopefully by their high school graduation, we all will probably have nurtured children who can cook for themselves and appreciate a broad spectrum of culinary influences. Or we will have created a set of culinary tyrants who lord their knowledge over their friends with an iron-chef fist. Given that seven of our 10 children are male, let's hope
for the former.

We didn't reach consensus on what larger forces were behind our household role as chief cook and bottle washer, but we did have a fantastic time talking, telling stories about ourselves and finding out more about each other -- all catalyzed by the sophisticated and delicious food brought by each one of the Men Who Cook. And since guys sometimes need a little help with the talking part, I think it's great to have a group like this, where we can connect, hang out with our
wives and have fun at the same time. I'm more than willing to continue to man the stove.

Two days after our dinner party, while I was eating my breakfast at 6:45 a.m. and thinking about writing this story, I
witnessed a small family milestone: Without a word, my bleary-eyed, barefoot son Collins stumbled in the kitchen, reached under the counter to grab a frying pan and cracked, whisked and scrambled eggs unprompted for the first time. This Man Who Cooks couldn't have been prouder.